27 February, 2012

Bringing creativity back - Winter tag

I've already mentioned my week off blogging and crafting. Having no creative energy was almost depressing so the whole week I was trying to come up with ways to get my creative mojo back.

I believe that creativity is a "muscle": the more you use it, the "better" it gets. So to bring my creative energy back I needed to create something. I needed a simple and fast project that would keep me happily-occupied.

Trying to come up with an idea for a project I made a mental checklist:

fast

fun and simple

challenging

This would also be an incredible opportunity to practice new techniques and mediums I wanted to try before. And to silence my inner critic I wanted to simply create, without any reasons or rules.

For the first creative exercise I decided to make 4 tags (fast and simple, right?) - one for each season. As it turned out the project was not as fast as it originally seemed but I managed to make all 4 tags in one (long) evening.

I began with winter, which to me means holidays and Christmas-time. I've used snippets of decorative branches: green, red, and golden. I also wanted to incorporate something from our Christmas decor so I used a string of a handmade garland.

Here is what I did for the background:

primed my tag with white acrylic gesso first and then used 2 distress inks: pine needles and old paper

using one of newly-bought stencils printed designs on the background with regular inks

At this point I noticed that the background calls for more colour. I wanted to bring back the red of my branches and repeat the round shape of berries, background design, and the garland. I made red confetti to add to the background:

sprayed a sheet of paper with red glimmer mist

once the sheet was dry - used a hole puncher to punch out confetti

fast, simple, and fun!

Last but not least, I attached all the branches onto the tag.

The tag came out more Christmasy than wintery but I do not mind it at all. After all, Christmas IS "the most wonderful time of the year".